Max Read

Here's Brad Paisley's new song "Accidental Racist," with a guest verse by LL Cool J. You can read the lyrics here. It appears to be... some kind of 11th-grade AP U.S. History project?

(Please note that Paisley, who kicks off the song with an anecdote about wearing a Confederate battle flag t-shirt to a Starbucks and describes himself in the song as "a white man/Living in the southland," is from West Virginia, a state famously birthed by the 41 Virginia counties that did not want to secede from the Union. "I'm proud of where I'm from," he sings, but apparently not proud enough to avoid wearing the symbol of the oppressive slave economy his home state's founders helped destroy?)

(Also, he defensively[?] claims that he's just wearing the flag shirt because he's a "Skynyrd fan" but then goes on to passive-aggressively defend the south, i.e., "we're still paying for mistakes/That a bunch of folks made long before we came," which, gosh, Brad, I don't think you're the one paying for the "mistake" of buying and selling human beings, really.)

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(And let's not even start with LL, who croons to Brad that "If you don't judge my gold chains/I'll forget the iron chains" [this is a bad negotiating strategy for reparations, James] before asserting that "The relationship between the Mason-Dixon needs some fixin'." Maybe he's in the middle of the Pynchon book?)